Medication adherence, including patient adherence to medication regimens, is an important aspect of any system providing medical services. Specifically, lack of medication adherence has a negative effect on outcomes and increases costs associated with providing medical services. For example, research shows that:                1. Approximately 25% of patients prescribed medications for a new illness fail to fill their initial prescription;        2. Approximately half of patients taking maintenance medications for a chronic disease stop taking their medications within the first year; and,        3. The estimated cost of unnecessary medical treatment attributable to medication non-adherence is $290 billion annually.        
Further, under the applicable laws and regulations, health care providers will be not be reimbursed for patients that are readmitted for the same chronic illness, such as congestive heart failure, within 30 days. Hospital admission data from 2009 shows 1.3 million Medicare patients were readmitted within 30 days based on drug events at an estimated cost of $12 billion. Other data indicates that one cause of repeat admissions is lack of adherence to medication regimens. Many of the reasons for the lack of adherence are related to problems with labeling of prescription medications. In general, the problems are related to inflexibility in the labeling process and include: illiteracy of the patient, the language used on the medication label (English typically) is not the primary language of the patient, and the size or configuration of the label is inadequate to enable inclusion of information necessary or helpful for the patient to understand and comply with the medication regimen.
Known medication packaging distribution channels use centralized distribution centers with minimum 12-24 hour turnaround times. Health care providers in hospitals often write or change patient prescriptions the day a patient is released, which does not allow enough time to provide the prescribed medication at the time of the patient's release.